Earlier this year, a curious little track called "Wait (The Whisper Song)" quietly trickled on to the internet, eventually becoming a leftfield hit with an expensive video and an all-star remix. Over a minimal bass pulse and a few finger-snaps, the Ying Yang Twins turned down the volume on their gravelly crunk howling to whisper intense X-rated come-ons: "Hey, bitch, wait till you see my dick/ I'ma beat that pussy up." Sexually exploitative hip-hop is nothing new, but this track's air of menace and complete lack of subtlety made it the last straw for more than a few listeners of both genders, a point where they could no longer excuse the casual misogyny in rap music. On the internet, sides formed. Did "beat the pussy up" refer to rape or rough sex? Were the whispers threats or seduction? Was it a joke? If it were, would that excuse it?
If you're looking for answers, United State of Atlanta isn't going to provide any. "Wait" is presented as part of a mid-album sex trilogy, followed by the even nastier spoken-not-sung track "Pull My Hair" and the awful quiet-storm slow jam "Bedroom Boom", and the three tracks are divided by skits of women with alert, precise speaking voices using spoken-word cadences talking about how they want to get fucked, as if the Twins are saying that intelligent women like this stuff, so it's OK. We also get "Live Again", a gliding, melodic mid-tempo track with a hook from (of all people) Maroon 5's Adam Levine, wherein the Twins paint a picture of a woman forced by economic circumstance into a job stripping, hoping to escape every day. And then there's "Hoes", where the Twins and female guest Jacki-O talk about hating hoes, with one Twin assuring women, "If you a bitch and you hate a bitch, you can sing this shit, too!"
There's a lso a song about the inhumanities of the prison system, a bluesy track about the dehumanizing effects of poverty, a song about the Twins' love for each other, a song about Jesus, and a whole lot of songs instructing strippers on how to dance. So. Um. Fuck. Can we talk about the beats yet? Because the beats on U.S.A. are really something.
Collipark provides almost all the album's tracks, lacing the Twins' bluesy, throaty voices with gleaming, futuristic jacked-up electro. The best tracks repeat their hooks enough to turn them into mantras, bass kicks exploding and maddeningly simple keyboard lines worming their way into your frontal lobe, Miami bass and Chicago house run through extremely expensive sequencers and morphing into a radiant space-age bounce. It's first-rate club music, and first-rate club music is always worth your attention.
People shouldn't feel like they have to excuse or get past "Wait"-- it's an entirely personal decision. If you feel OK about the track, you'll find that U.S.A. is a good-not-great Southern rap album, overlong and weighted down by too many inept slow tracks but boasting enough furious, kinetic dance tracks to make it worth your money. If you don't, that's fine. Your life isn't going to be any poorer without this album.
